Chapter 7 #2
She studies me a moment, hazel eyes clear. “Is watching all of your work the same as knowing you?”
Her question is as open and genuine as ever, but I can only blink at her. Has anyone ever made such a clear distinction between me and my documentaries? “Well,” I finally say. “You at least know some about me.”
“Is that strange for you?”
“A little,” I admit. “But mostly because I want to know as much about you. More, really.”
We’re well past pretending I’m not deeply—fine, all-consumingly—curious about her. But my words still seem to hang heavy in the air around us.
“Why did you make that first documentary?” she asks.
I consider as I stare at a fossil. “My parents are both lawyers—”
“Tracks.”
Jesus, she’s cute.
“—but my dad was an amateur science enthusiast. I spent my whole childhood doing experiments with him in our garage.”
“Mentos in soda?”
I snort. “It definitely started there. By the time I finished middle school, we had built a rudimentary computer from scratch.”
She looks genuinely impressed. “Yeah, my science education was …” she pantomimes a flatline.
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? I had been reading and experimenting and engaging in the scientific process my whole life, and then my high school science education was seriously lacking.”
She leans into me. “For the week on evolution, my teacher played some random pro-evolution video, and then some random pro-creation video, and told us we could all decide. And never said another word about it.”
“Exactly. Topics were off limits, funding was nonexistent. But my parents were vehemently in favor of keeping me in the public school system on principle. You know, union allies or bust. I didn’t really start out to become a documentarian,” I say, finding the truth of my words as they come out.
“I just knew that someone had to show what was going on.”
“And you took it upon yourself?” There’s a hint of admiration in her sweet voice, but also … concern?
“I started with just my iPhone. I downloaded stock permission forms online, started making phone calls. Watched tutorial videos on how to use editing software. I think I just wanted to understand at first. But then I realized so many people needed a platform to speak, and so many people needed to listen. So much is swept under the rug or just accepted as the norm that should not be the norm.”
“So you made another video.” That’s definitely concern. Like she understands the weight of what I’m describing.
“And another and another and another. I didn’t go to college—this work felt too important.”
“And how does it feel now?”
Her question once again pulls me up short. I cut my eyes to her, but she doesn’t seem to expect any particular answer. Her face is as open as ever.
I don’t answer, and she doesn’t push. We simply line up where workers are handing out dig kits and dinosaur vests.
How does my work feel to me now? No one has ever asked me that.
The worker hands Christina a dig kit and asks what size dino vest her child would need.
Christina doesn’t even blink. “The biggest one you have.”
As soon as we step away from the booth, Christina throws on the fuzzy, bright green vest over her trench coat. She can’t close it all the way since it was designed for an eight-year-old, but she still flops the dinosaur hood over her head—donning big dino eyes and teeth—before growling at me.
For what feels like the hundredth time since I met her, I am so glad the camera is rolling.
She falters in her ferocity with the flash of a wide smile—oh, I think in response to my own—but then she’s growling again, curling her fingers into claws and creeping closer and closer until she’s shredding into my chest with what ultimately amounts to light scrapes of her fingernails.
Don’t think about her fingernails digging in any harder.
I’m chuckling when I throw my hands over hers to steady them. She merely flattens her palms against my chest and smiles again.
“Wait, do dinosaurs growl?” she asks.
“No one knows for sure, but they probably made sounds similar to large birds. Like emus or ostriches.”
She tilts her head. “What sound do ostriches make?”
“They do this bellow thing.”
“What bellow thing?”
“Like a bellow, with some hissing.”
“How can a bird bellow?”
“They have different vocal mechanisms.”
“Show me.”
“What?”
“Today’s about science, Danny. I need to know what this sounds like.”
There’s no way this isn’t going to be extremely unattractive, but god knows I can’t deny this woman anything she asks of me. I blow out a breath and then reach deep in my gut to emulate the sound.
I realize after a torturous five seconds of my best ostrich imitation that I’ve been holding her palms flat to my chest this entire time because she’s now clutching at me through her laughter.
I drop my hands but can’t stop the smile from taking over my face in light of her laughter. “You did that on purpose.”
She slides her hands up my chest to give my shoulders a light squeeze before releasing me, even as she struggles to catch her breath. “Yes, I did. You would make a beautiful ostrich, Maestro.”
I quickly yank her earlobe.
She yelps and bats my hand away. “To be fair,” she chuckles, “I kind of expected you to take out the magical computer in your pocket that can answer any question and play a sound bite of what an ostrich sounds like, but this was a million times better.”
I scowl at her, no doubt unconvincingly, since she chuckles again.
Dino vest still on, she plops down right in the middle of the sand pit. I survey the children surrounding us, most of them digging and chucking sand wildly. She carefully unfurls the tool kit, studies the instructions, and discerningly selects a small scoop.
“We’ll use this to remove the loose layer of top sand,” she says, eyes still on the instructions, “and then we’ll switch to the chisel when we get to the harder compacted sand underneath.”
She looks up at me eagerly, with just a hint of that mischief. One brow rises. “Are Maestros too good to get in the dirt?”
I shake my head at her impropriety but plop my ass down in the sand beside her all the same, careful not to jostle the selfie stick too much. “Where my muse leads …”
She grins as if that was the best answer I could have given.
Ten minutes and at least six Jurassic Park references later, she’s wrapped both hands around my arm, jostling me so severely that I do full out drop the selfie stick.
But I can only laugh because she is beyond words at having finally struck bone.
We switch to the smaller rock hammers and brushes to fully uncover it.
Well, I first use the brush on my camera so we can keep rolling.
“Will you take a picture of me?” she asks, offering her phone. “I realize you’re recording this entire thing, but I promised my friends a pic from today, and I don’t think it’s going to get any better than this vest and our bone discovery.”
I take her phone but nearly drop it when she poses with a snarl and her dinosaur claws back out. “Wait, so you’re a dinosaur digging up dinosaur bones?”
She starts for a moment, her features going slack, but then snatches up the rock hammer and resumes her pose. “Obviously. I’m desperate for news of my ancestors.”
I snap the pic and see that she had opened her camera within a text chain: Sloppy Bitches + Runzhou.
I snort. “Are you one of the Sloppy Bitches?”
“Muse, Sloppy Bitch …” She bats her eyelashes at me as she wiggles out of the dino vest. “I go by many names.”
“But—” I double-check the name before handing her phone back to her. “Runzhou isn’t a Sloppy Bitch?”
She laughs fondly. “That’s my roommate. His partner, K, says we’re all sloppy bitches except for him. No one disagrees.”
We continue digging. “So you really just take pictures for yourself and your friends? No socials?”
She gasps. “Did you try to stalk me online, Danny Reeves?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s natural to research someone you’re thinking of committing a whole documentary to.” Although the documentary is about ten percent of the reason I tried so desperately to find her online after that night at Waffle House. I mostly just wanted to see her again, even in pictures.
Is it my imagination, or does her face fall a bit? At the reminder that she’s a project for me? “Truthfully,” I add thickly, “I probably would have stalked you online after we first met regardless.”
That little truth is potentially the opposite direction of how I need to navigate my increasingly complicated feelings toward Christina, but she blinks once and then smiles. One of the sweet, soft ones. Almost like she’s sharing a secret with me.
Worth it.
She continues digging, that smile continuing to play at her lips. “I deleted all of my social media around nine months ago,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because …” She hesitates for only a moment but then squares those shoulders. “Because I didn’t want my family to have access to any part of my life.”
I’m not sure that’s the answer I expected.
She tosses me a sad smile when she notices I’m frowning down at her.
I know there’s more to her family than she’s told me; there always is when it comes to pastors’ families.
And while I’m desperate to know, I’m also slightly afraid to know.
I’m afraid of my reaction if I find out she’s been mistreated.
Well, I guess I already know she’s been mistreated. Just look at TJL.
“I became the black sheep of the family overnight,” she explains.
“One minute I’m the youngest child and only girl.
I have three older brothers who are all in ministry, who are all married to perfectly submissive women who live to have babies.
And I was on the same path. I was dedicated, devout, pure.
” Her voice is sharpening more and more with every word.
“Why did you become the black sheep?”
She stops digging and blinks at me. “I stopped going to church.”
“That’s it?”